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Democracy
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2007-08 Theme: Democracy and Citizenship in the 21st Century
Theme Overview
During academic years 2007-08 and 2008-09, the Wayne Morse Center explores aspects of the changing conception of citizenship and the democratic process in the United States and other countries. The Center's inquiry examines evolving theories of democracy and citizenship, from constitutional law to voting rights as well as current issues such as executive power and civil liberties.
During 2007-08 the inquiry focused on international topics such as global citizenship, the U.S. and Latin America, international human rights, and the role of international social movements in building democratic institutions. Noted anthropologist Arturo Escobar occupied the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics and lead a forum at the UO on Violence and Reconciliation in Latin America: Memory, Human Rights and Democracy.
Resident Scholars presented programs on immigration and labor law reform.
The focus on Latin America was in the Morse tradition. Senator Morse was chair of the Latin American Affairs subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the 1950s and 1960s, and he became increasingly critical of U.S. activities in Latin America. Read more in a paper by James Tschudy, “Plenty of Advice and Not So Much Consent: Senator Wayne Morse and U.S. Policy in Latin America.” (552K PDF)
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Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics:
Arturo Escobar 2007-08
 Arturo
Escobar occupied the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics in 2007-08.
Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Teaching Professor
of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill. He is also the former Director of the Institute of Latin American
Studies at UNC. Professor Escobar is a Colombian national and a U.S.
citizen. His research spans several areas in anthropology, including
international political ecology, social movement theory,
theories of development, and science and technology studies. His most
recent work focuses
on social movements and biodiversity and how places and regions
struggle for difference and diversity under globalization. Escobar's
work broadens our understanding of globalization and the processes
of modernity, highlighting the importance of place, colonialism and
alternatives to the hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge and development.
View Escobar's curriculum vitae (90K PDF).
Escobar coordinated a project on the underlying nature of the democratic election of Left and Center-Left governments in several Latin American countries, and this was the subject of his public address on January 31, 2008. Escobar's book, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press 1995), focused on how the industrialized regions of North America and Europe came to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War Two societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Professor Escobar was in residence at the UO for the first three weeks of winter term, 2008. He cotaught an anthropology class with Professor Lynn Stephen on “Anthropologies of Development and Social Movements.” This course linked democratization of knowledge, democratization of development, and the transformation of anthropology.
Professor Escobar's public address,“Left Turn? Right Turn? Where is Latin America Going? Perspectives from Development, Implications for Democracy,” focused on recent political developments in Latin America and examined their underlying nature. This address was the opening keynote address of a major conference cosponsored by the Wayne Morse Center and the Latin American Studies Program on “Violence and Reconciliation in Latin America: Memory, Human Rights and Democracy.”
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2007-08 Resident Scholars
Garrett Epps
Garrett
Epps, 2007-08 Wayne Morse Center Resident Scholar and Hollis
Professor of Law, conducted research into the birthright
citizenship guarantee of the 14th Amendment. Epps is
the author of Democracy Reborn: The
Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights
in Post-Civil War America. A former staff writer
for the Washington Post, he is the author of two novels
and numerous articles and books on constitutional law.
His book on Oregon's famous peyote case, To an
Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, was a
finalist for the American Bar Association Silver Gavel
Award in 2002. Epps convened a symposium on Immigration
and Citizenship held on January 25, 2008.
Gordon Lafer
Gordon
Lafer, Associate Professor at the Labor Education and
Research Center and the Department of Political Science,
researched issues of democracy at the workplace. Lafer
has studied the nature of union elections and advocates
for changes to U.S. labor law to improve workplace democracy.
Lafer gave a talk entitled...
“Enduring Feudalism?
The State of Federal Labor Law”
Monday, April 7, 2008
Knight Law Center, Room 141
Noon
This talk included discussion of the difference between employer and employee-free speech rights at the workplace, and it examined the legal rights of employees to participate as citizens in elections to public office compared with workplace elections for unionization.
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Visiting Distinguished Scholars
Richard Delgado
During spring, 2008, the Wayne Morse Center welcomed an alumni of the Wayne
Morse Chair of Law and Politics, Professor Richard
Delgado and his wife Jean
Stefancic as Visiting Distinguished Scholars.
Delgado is one of the leading commentators on race in
the United States in both academia and the media. His
books have won eight national book prizes, including
six Gustavus Myers Awards for outstanding book on human
rights in North America, the American Library Association's
Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
Delgado's most recent books include The Politics
of Fear and the Republican Ascendancy, with Manuel
Gonzalez, and Justice at War: Civil Liberties and
Civil Rights During Times of Crisis.
Delgado visited the UO with his wife, legal writer Jean Stefancic, from
the University of Pittsburgh where he holds the title of University Distinguished
Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow.
View Delgado's
curriculum vita (70K PDF)
Jean Stefancic
Jean Stefancic
is Research Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Scholar
at the University of Pittsburgh, where she writes
about civil rights, law reform, social change, and legal
scholarship. Her book, No Mercy: How Conservative
Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America's
Social Agenda, published by Temple University Press
in 1996, won critical praise in the nonlegal as well as
legal community. She has written and co-authored
numerous articles and ten books, many with her husband
Richard Delgado. Their 1997 book, Critical White Studies:
Looking Behind the Mirror (Temple University Press)
won a Gustavus Myers award for outstanding book on human
rights in North American in 1998.
View Stefancic's
curriculum vita (33K PDF)
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Distinguished Speakers
Steven M. Tipton
Author and sociologist Steve Tipton delivered a public address on “Public Pulpits: Religion
in the Moral Argument of Public Life” on November 19,
2007, at 7:00 p.m. in Room 175 of the Knight Law Center. Based
on his forthcoming book, the address offered an overview of
faith in public life and the moral ambiguity of the American polity.
Steven M. Tipton teaches sociology, religion, and
ethics at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology,
where he is Professor of Sociology of Religion. A graduate of Harvard
University with a joint Ph.D. in Sociology and the Study of Religion
in l979, he is the author of Public Pulpits, a study of
national religious advocacy by the mainline churches in Washington,
and Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion
and Cultural Change. He coauthored with Robert Bellah et
al The Good Society and Habits of the Heart,
nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A native of San Francisco, he has
worked in Harlem as a murder investigator for the New York State
Superior Court, and played semi-professional baseball in California.
Greg Grandin
 Noted author Greg Grandin visited the UO in winter, 2008, to compliment the visit of Arturo Escobar and delivered a keynote address at a major conference on “Violence
and Reconciliation in Latin America: Memory, Human Rights and
Democracy.” Grandin discussed the history of U.S. involvement in Latin America and the current “transition to democracy” in historical context at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, February 1, 2008 in the Fir Room, EMU on the UO campus.
Grandin is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at New York University. His latest book is Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (71K PDF review from The Texas Observer). Grandin is also the author of The Blood of Guatemala (Duke, 2000), which won the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Book Award for best book on Latin America; and The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, 2004.) He has served on the United Nations Truth Commission for Guatemala, and has published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Harper's, The Nation, the Boston Review, and the New York Times. He has most recently been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ryskamp Fellowship Program.
Read Greg Grandin's Abstract (20K
PDF).
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Wayne Morse Center Events, 2007-08
Film Fest — Politics of Dissent: Human Stories For Our Times
October 5, 6, 7, 2007, Bijou Art Cinemas
This special slate of five international, American contemporary and classic 35mm films was presented by the Eugene Weekly in conjunction with the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.
The films included: Medium Cool (1969), Road to Guantánamo (2006), Osama (2004), Iraq in Fragments (2006), and 12 Angry Men (1957). For more detailed information about each of the films, see the link to the web page below:
Additional Information:
View Film Fest Web Page
Eugene
Weekly Film Fest insert - published 09/27/07 (308K PDF)
Examining Guantánamo
October 8, 2007
This symposium, organized by the Wayne Morse Fellows, discussed legal issues raised by the detention of prisoners at the U.S. Naval base in Guantánamo Bay. Panelists included Steve Wax, the federal public defender for the District of Oregon who representing seven Guantánamo Bay detainees; Tom Johnson, legal counsel for Guantánamo Bay detainee Ihlkham Battayav; and Ibrahim Gassama, a UO law professor who has done extensive work on human rights and foreign policy issues. Garrett Epps, the 2007-08 Morse Center Resident Scholar and the UO Hollis Professor of Law, moderated the discussion.
The panel considered whether current legal processes protect the rights of non-citizens in a democracy and explored the implications of U.S. treatment of non-citizens during times of war. The discussion focused on legal strategies for defending the Guantánamo Bay detainees.
Additional Information:
 Listen to Guantanámo Podcast
Oregon Emerald Article 10/08/07
Immigration and Citizenship
Friday, January 25, 2008
A one-day symposium led by 2007-08 Wayne Morse Resident Scholar and Hollis Professor of Law Garrett Epps, featuring Kevin Johnson at the University of California–Davis, Hiroshi Motomura at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and John Eastman of Chapman University School of Law.
Currently the most debated citizenship issue involves the contested terrain of immigration. This symposium presented several of the nation's leading scholars on constitutional law and immigration policy. Speakers analyzed U.S. migration policy and argued for more openness and attention to the concept of citizenship. The morning panel featured a dialogue on the birthright citizenship guarantee of the 14th Amendment. The afternoon panel included community advocates discussing the politics of immigration policy at a local level.
Additional Information:
Press Release
View Immigration and Citizenship web page and schedule
Eugene Weekly Article 01/24/08
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Violence and Reconciliation in Latin America: Human Rights,
Memory and Democracy
January 31 to February 2, 2008
 This major symposium, cosponsored by the UO Latin American Studies Program, examined issues related to Latin America’s violent past and its search for both the truth about what happen and its search for democracy. These themes resonate globally today as the war in Iraq and the “Global War on Terror” has produced some of the same circumstances and questions.
Keynote lectures included Wayne Morse Scholar Arturo Escobar on “Left Turn, Right Turn? Where is Latin America Going?”; Greg Grandin, the 2008 Bartolomé de las Casas Lecturer in Latin American Studies on “Remembering Latin America’s Other ‘Transition to Democracy;” and Arturo Arias on “The Ghosts of the Past, Human Dignity, and the Collective Need for Reparation.”
Scholars from the United States and Latin America presented papers on a range of topics such as reassessing truth commissions’ reports, accounts of violence, political prisoners, memory in film and documentaries, and gender and violence.
Case studies were presented from Peru, Guatemala, Chile, Colombia,
Mexico Argentina, and the U.S.
Additional Information:
Press Release
View Violence and Reconciliation website and schedule
View Poster
Eugene Weekly Article
View keynote speaker Arturo Escobar's Slide Lecture 01/31/08
Book Event for Steve Bender
March 14, 2008.
Steve Bender, James L. and Ilene R. Hershner Professor of Law at the University of Oregon, read from his book, One Night in America: Robert Kennedy, César Chávez, and the Dream of Dignity. Bender chronicles the warm friendship of Robert Kennedy and César Chávez and embraces their bold political vision for making the American dream a reality for all. While many books discuss Kennedy or Chávez individually, this is the first book to capture their multifaceted relationship and its relevance to mainstream U.S. politics and Latino/a politics today. Commentary was provided by Visiting Distinguished Scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. This event was cosponsored by the Latin American Law Students Association.
Ambivalent Sisterhood: Feminist Legal Reform in Bangladesh.
April 10, 2008
Lamia Karim, Assistant Professor Dept of Anthropology, presented her preliminary work, conducted with a small grant from Wayne Morse Center, on feminist legal reform in the area of Family Laws in December 2007 in Bangladesh. It examined the role played by feminists in garnering equality for Muslim women, and how changes in Family Laws play out in the lives of poor women. This event was cosponsored by the Women's Law Forum and the International Law Project.
Book Event for Joe Lowndes
June 5,2008
Joseph Lowndes, Assistant Professor of Political Science,  talked from his new book “From the New Deal to the New Right.” An Introduction with given by Associate Law Professor professor Robert Tsai.
 Lowndes explores the intellectual origins of modern conservatism and the role the South played in contemporary conservatism, perhaps the most consequential political phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. The region’s transition from Democratic stronghold to Republican base has frequently been viewed as a recent occurrence, one that largely stems from a 1960s-era backlash against left-leaning social movements. But Lowndes argues that this rightward shift was not necessarily a natural response by alienated whites, but rather the result of the long-term development of an alliance between Southern segregationists and Northern conservatives, two groups who initially shared little beyond opposition to specific New Deal imperatives.
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Project Grants, 2007-08
Eugene Weekly Film Festival. “Democracy and Citizenship in the 21st Century”
International Migration and Citizenship. Anthropology course taught by Marcela Mendoza, adjunct faculty in the Anthropology Department.
City of Eugene Human Rights Commission. Human Rights Commission of the City of Eugene symposium, “Bring Human Rights Home: Implementing International Human Rights in the United States.” November 9, 2007.
Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW). Visiting Kenyan scholar Michael Ochieng Odhiambo.
Ambivalent Sisterhood: Feminist Legal Reform and Female Subjectivity in Bangladesh and Malaysia. Lamia Karim, Associate Professor in the UO Anthropology Department, research examining the role of Islamic feminists and secularists in securing Muslim women’s citizenship rights. April 10, 2008.
Civil Liberties Defense Center. Summer stipend for public interest law students conducting research for various Center projects.
Gender, Families and Immigration in Oregon. Conference on “Gender, Families and Immigration in Oregon” sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society with community participation. May 2008.
UO MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan). For annual Raza Unida Youth Conference.
Public Interest Public Service Program (PIPS) speaker series.
Constitutional Law Section of the Oregon State Bar. “The Evolution of the Oregon Constitution: An Exercise in Democracy.” Video project expected to be completed in 2009.
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